Category: Broadcaster's Lounge
Hi.
My question might sound stupid to the experienced users but i didn't find a good solution myself so i wanted to ask you.
First of all i need to tell you that i work for the organisation of the Blind in Cyprus at the recording studio where we produce talking magazines and books.
My question is if it is possible to use something to remove automatically breths and other noices from an existing recording?
When we were two people here in the studio we used to remove manualy all the breths and replace them with silence deppending of the panctuation etc but now i am on my own and our magazine is more than 6 hours long and i find it very time consuming to do this on my own so i am wondering if this can be done automatically.
When i am listening to talking books from England, the USA etc the books have very few breths in it when somebody is reading and i am wondering how they mannage to do it and they still they produce a large ammound of books.
Some of my friends tell me that i shouldn't care because without breths it wouldn't sound natural because it is impossible for somebody to read without breething but i think the professional standarts today require no breths in the recording.
So i would like to see your oppinion about this.
I am using adobe audition 3 with NVDA by the way.
Thanks in advance.
Nikos
At certain times, breaths are pretty natural and not at all unprofessional. That said, there are definately times wher ethey should be taken out. You'll need to get rid of them. Unfortunately I know of no way to do this automatically. my only possible recommendation is to use a noise cancellation together with a sample of breath, then apply that filter through the entire file. It will remove all the lower frequencies on that particular level. WHat that might do however is negatively effect the quality of the recording. In the end, editing takes time, patience and dedication.
Hi Nikos.
I am not familiar with adobe audition, but use goldwave.
In goldwave there is a feature to reduce silences. You can manipulate the threshold for a silence and how long the silence has to be before it is considered a silence.
If adobe audition has such a feature, it seems you could manipulate the feature to take out most of the breaths. However, if you make the time too short you'll cut out the space between sentences.
Just my thoughts.
Bob
Hi there,
Yes Adobe audition does have the similar feature where you can incert some sort of silences. I believe you can do this during your SCS track. However, it might not sound as natural as it is not. After all, it is sort of natural for human to take a breath every now and then.
As long as it is not like every sentent or so, i don't see a major problem there.
If you take out all the breaving spot, it might become not so natural
The problem with noise cancellation is, if done incorreclty, it can change the quality of your recording. You're taking out minute frequencies. That may be noticed by you and others. By all means use it, but be careful.
Best to do it manually. could take out stuff you dont want. If there's no breathing it'll sound shitty. Perhaps they could just record a the few words around the spot and you could manually edit it later, or on the fly.
I know this is a bit old, but I just have to say that as far as audio recording goes; the unavoidable truth is "shit in, shit out" It sounds like what you need is a noise gate, not a noise filter. But, as I said, to try to make the recording as clean as possible from the start is the only good way. Talking too close to the mic is a big nono. Also, if the overall audio level is a bit low, no gate or filter will help. It's easier to lower a level and remove noise, than it is to boost a level without also boosting the noise. I would think Goldwave probably has something that can be used though. But yes, taking out all sounds of being human is not a good idea, even in vocal recordings, you want to leave that in or it sounds artificial and stilted. Just my experience.
What's a noise gate?